1 Night, 2 Awards, 3 miles apart & 4 Nominations ……

Date: February 7, 2014

Author: Andrea

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We’re just about all warmed up into 2014 and the first round of the City’s award celebrations are upon us, with Downtown in Business COMBA (City of Manchester Business Awards) 2014 at Manchester Cathedral and Talk of Manchester ‘Grafters’ Awards celebrating North West Property and Construction Industry, at The Point, Lancashire County Cricket Club.

With over 300 dates in the year to choose from, you’d think they’d pick separate nights but nope, Frank and Paul are partying on the same night – Thursday 20th March and creating a problem, albeit a nice problem to figure out!

At COMBA 2014, we’re delighted to have been shortlisted as Best Property Business of the Year for a second year running, against the giants Bruntwood (2013 winners), the brilliant OBi and Capital Properties, internal space magicians TSK and affordbale housing experts Housing Ladder . Given the success of last years inaugural Awards, we’re also sponsoring Best Start Up of the Year, something close to my own heart and the shortlist is fantastic.

With Grafters North West, we’ve made it on to Best Property Management Company, Best Use of Social Media and Entrepreneur of the Year shortlisting for myself which is awesome recognition for the hard work, achievements and contribution we have all made at urbanbubble to the Manchester Business and Property communities.

We’ve had a phenomenal 5 years (Birthday Bash BBQ in the Summer – watch out for your save the date invite!) and by the end of 2014, we’ll be caring for near 90 residential schemes with a tad under 6000 homes and 10,000 residents. I started in 2008 with a laptop, mobile phone and belly full of fire to do better than the incumbents overcharging and under delivering. Today, I’m proud to have a built a 40 strong team, with a cool 4k sq ft home in the Northern Quarter, delivering a multi award winning service to some of Manchester’s best residential developments.

2014 is all about investing in our processes, our technology, our people and providing the ‘Wow’ effect to our customers every time we’re in touch. It’s more than a project, it’s a Business Transformation which will eradicate the waste, redefine everyone’s roles and encompass technology at every level we operate. Properties we care for will get even better savings on their running costs, owners and residents even greater engagement and transparency with the running of their home and our people allowed to concentrate on providing customer service and property management like never before.

Strategically, we’ve been working on a new residential property management model, born in 2011, now a buzzword in the resi prop world under the term PRS (Private Rented Sector). We didn’t create the buzz, but we did spot it 3 years ago, recognising the blockages with building high density city centre homes, constraints with selling them and changing priorities of the typical occupier. Funds, Pension and Institutional investors unlocking, building and owning large city centre residential apartment schemes, built to exceptional standards, managed by one Residential Asset Manager caring for all aspects of the property and occupiers, providing, safe, stable returns for the asset owner.

I expect in 2014, urbanbubble can announce more than 1 scheme to which we are appointed as Residential Asset Manager, building on our unique site and property management service, taking the first steps into a new approach to residential property management in Manchester and the UK.

2013 was an epic, where we doubled in size in every manner, won Manchester Property Professional and NW Property Entrepreneur awards along with a special recognition for our work we have done for The Factory Youth Zone in Harpurhey, our Charity of choice. We’d pop with joy if we could capture your vote and represent ourselves well at both of these awards in March. We’re not quite sure, just yet, how we split ourselves but being residential property managers, we tend to be good at figuring these sort of problems out!